The International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO) has formally issued a Serious Safety Concern (SSC) against Thailand after the country’s Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) failed to adequately address regulatory oversight shortcomings identified during a Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme (USOAP) inspection in January.

Thailand reportedly only satisfied 21 out the 100 criteria inspected during the USOAP audit with problem areas said to include personnel licensing and training, airworthiness assessment and certification, airline operations oversight and the granting of Air Operator Certificates (AOC) to airlines.

The ICAO found conflict of interest in that the DCA is both the regulator and the operator of provincial airports in the country. It also warned of insufficient personnel inspection and leniency in issuing air transport licenses. Significant safety concerns (SSC) indicated that the state was not providing sufficient safety oversight to ensure the effective implementation of applicable ICAO standards, the organisation said.

The DCA was subsequently given a 90-day period to submit a plan of corrective measures to the ICAO for approval and while its initial draft was rejected, a second was delivered near the 14 May deadline. The ICAO is required to issue a country with an SSC should it fail to adequately correct flaws identified in its audit within the 90-day period.

Bangkok said it would establish two new organisations – the National Civil Aviation Institute and the Air Transport Department – to oversee the Thailand’s aviation sector and its airports and infrastructure respectively. In addition, existing aviation laws are to be tightened while new regulations regarding the issuance of Air Operator Certificates (AOC) and Air Service Licenses (ASL), as well the transportation of hazardous materials, are to be drafted.

It is unclear how this latest announcement by ICAO will impact Thai carriers as a number of regional countries within Asia slapped restrictions on Thai-domiciled carriers earlier when news first broke of the fact the country had fared so poorly in its audit. For its part, Thai Airways International has moved to distance itself from the SSC stressing it maintains its level of operations up to international standards.

A number of countries including: Japan, South Korea, Cambodia, Singapore, Australia, and China have already sanctioned Thai charter operators such Orient Thai Airlines, NokScoot, Jet Asia Airways, City Airways, R Airlines, Thai AirAsia X, Asia Atlantic Airlines and Jet Asia Airways either through restricting their operations outright or subjecting them to additional stringent safety checks.

Thai AirAsia X has subsequently announced it will suspend flights to Sapporo Chitose, Japan with effect from August onwards citing the formal SCC announcement. The Japan Civil Aviation Bureau (JCAB) gave the AirAsia X subsidiary permission to launch its Bangkok Don Mueang- Sapporo service on 1 May on condition that it uses AirAsia X aircraft, pilots, crews and airline codes to do so. Since then, the Thai carrier has had to renew its route authority with the JCAB on a monthly basis.

However, given the long term uncertainty that the infraction carries with it, Thai AirAsia X has decided to suspend its flights to Hokkaido until the outlook improves. “There was too much uncertainty and anxiety over how much longer we could continue with the Sapporo flights. It’s better to retreat. If we keep doing this on a monthly basis, we cannot plan long term,” Tassapon Bijleveld, CEO of Thai AirAsia X, told the Bangkok Post. He said the re-launch of the Sapporo service could come by the end of this year, or early next.

The US Fe deral Av i at i o n Administration intends to start auditing Thailand-registered airlines in mid-July and the ICAO is scheduled to undertake another inspection of Thailand’s aviation sector in October/ November of this year. Twelve other states with red flags on the ICAO’s 187-member country list are: Angola, Botswana, Djibouti, Eritrea, Georgia, Haiti, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Malawi, Nepal, Sierra Leone and Uruguay.